privileged dependence -- weaning art

Once there was a time when the royal court spoke a different language than the common folk who baked their bread and tilled their fields. The disdain that arose from this privileged dependence, a quite human compensation for knowing you're doing wrong, could be quite freely expressed since it was over the head of all but the house-servants. There have been a few such times on different parts of the planet and it's never turned out well.

The federal government in oh so many ways supports an art that involves maybe one percent of the population -- no, way less than that. Rusting culvert pipe squashing itself atop some building, who looks up, isn’t going to uplift the rest of us. We don’t speak that language. All this gigantic movement of money, bought at auction held in trust donated for tax considerations, doesn’t really trickle down to working artists and their natural constituents, those common folk who bake the bread and till the fields -- everybody else. 

To call it a gigantic money laundering racket wouldn’t be polite, although I have hinted from time to time -- see below. You decide. It’s easier to say that ‘contemporary art,’ without the NEA grants, without foundation tax shelters, without federal and state support for a remarkably dead-ended academic establishment, would evaporate -- finally a contextually relevant outcome. The ‘foreign language’ of the ephemeral installation, the half-baked deskilled assemblage, the mashup of borrowed ideas just wouldn’t be spoken around here any more.

This is not the time to increase funding for a self-chosen court of art insiders, income dependent bureaucrats all mannered and intrigued, and for an art which interests so few of us. Civic officers let your discretionary dollars flow to where they’re needed more, somewhere else, and let art -- production, distribution, appreciation and ownership, manage on its own. This will eventually happen, is happening, anyway, and your well-meaning helping hand just gets in the way. 

http://owningart.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-of-330-million-dollar-finger.html   -- and note the comment attached.